The statistics we've been through several times already, as I recall
@boulderjohn even read the reports and found e.g. a guy who climbed aboard and had a heart attack before undoing his belt buckle. Correlation is not causation.
A number of years ago that I responded to a thread talking about the number of divers who die with their weights on by going through 2 years of DAN reports, reading the descriptions of the deaths to see how often removing weights would have made a difference. Yes, I did mention a case where the fatality was a heart attack that happened after the guy got on the boat, which I mentioned as an example of a case where ditching weights would not have made a difference.
IIRC, I found that in 10% of the fatality descriptions, it was
possible that dropping weights
MIGHT have made a difference. That included the cases in which a missing diver's body was found with no known reason for the fatality. If the circumstances of death were not well known, I gave weight dropping the benefit of the doubt. There were very, very few cases in which you would say, "yep, should have dropped the weights."
The most common cause of deaths was medical, usually a heart attack, with symptoms very sudden, with the diver either making it to the surface or passing out and dropping unconscious to the bottom. A joint PADI/DAN study that led to the latest changes in the PADI OW course found that the number one preventable (i.e., diver error) cause of death was a gas embolism following a panicked, rapid ascent to the surface, probably holding the breath, often following an OOA experience. In those cases, dropping weights would not only not have helped, they might have made it worse.
The primary cases in which dropping weights would have helped were a handful when an OOA diver reached the surface and could not stay there because of the inability to inflate the BCD with an empty cylinder. Those cases are the reason the current PADI standards emphasize both oral inflation and dropping weights on the surface. It should be noted, though, that a diver who cannot stay on the surface with an empty cylinder is grossly overweighted, especially considering the degree to which the BCD should have expanded upon ascent. In fact, a properly weighted recreational diver should have trouble descending with an empty cylinder.